I was about ready to start worrying needlessly! Since mine are all shelter dogs, they are always microchipped. I know someone will point their finger at me, but I hate the clinging sounds of tags and I don't put them on. My dogs are never off leash and never out of my sight even if they are outside in the blocked wall backyard. If they are quiet while outside, I check on them after 2 minutes. I'm a smothering pawrent.

And I really think I could outrun Comet even on a bad day (I'd be too embarrassed to admit it if I couldn't).

In answer to the question of migrating chips, it probably doesn't matter all that much when the chip is put in; some just tend to migrate! Even breeds with lots of skin and wrinkle like Bulldogs tend to keep their chips where they belong. The best place is high up on the scruff of the neck. I think that more migrate if placed too far back between the shoulders.

Pam

Martin

Guest

18

15 July 2014 - 6:24 am

Hi there ,
I am also an MRI tech working in veterinary MRI of dogs and cats. I was initially concerned about microchips in MRI, so I did a study as my master's degree thesis looking at safety of pet microchips in MRI. As long as the chips have been in a few months, it is unlikely that they will migrate due to the pulling effect of the magnet. In my study they did not heat up (which some metallic objects can do in MRI) either. All the microchips I looked at still worked after the MRI scan. The only down side is that in *some* very small patients (I'm talking about cat size) the microchip can cause a kind of shadow on the image which *in a small proportion of cases* can interfere with diagnosis. If you have a good MRI tech they can actually stop this effect happening by swapping the phase encoding direction (they'll know what this means), so this still shouldn't be an issue at all. Although I was only able to test using one kind of scanner, in my opinion you shouldn't have any problems with other kinds either.

Martin said
Hi there ,
I am also an MRI tech working in veterinary MRI of dogs and cats. I was initially concerned about microchips in MRI, so I did a study as my master's degree thesis looking at safety of pet microchips in MRI.

Martin thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. The MRI, microchips and cancer topic definitely deserves another look, we'll be creating a new blog post about it soon and will mention your paper. Stay tuned.